Weekly Roundup: March 5, 2021
Rethinking the First Amendment, restructuring health governance, the Conference continues, and more!
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Democratizing Governance to Advance Health Justice and Economic Democracy
The inequities and exclusions of the U.S. health care system are well known, but the two prevailing strategies in health law and policy—privatization and technocracy—both fail to address disparities in power that produce health injustices. To advance health justice, we need multiple pathways through which everyday people—acting both as individuals and. . .
After the “Great Deplatforming”: Reconsidering the Shape of the First Amendment
We do not want to have to choose between John Roberts and Mark Zuckerberg as the guardians of democracy, though that is what current doctrine seems to require. Luckily, the contemporary framework is not the only one available to us.
Weekly Roundup: February 26, 2021
Posts on causal inference and on rent cancellation and The Conference continues!
The Case for Making Rent Disappear
To understand what’s at stake in the fight for rent cancellation, we first need to understand the significance of rent. In the US, rent is the vehicle for a wealth transfer from the poorest third of the population to a mere 7% of US residents and a relatively small number of corporate entities. The mom-and-pop landlords that make up that 7% face more. . .
Law, Liberation, and Causal Inference
The incorporation of empirical analysis via statistical methods into interpretive and normative legal frameworks calls for scrutiny into the nature of the role this input plays in the law. We can take lessons from disputes in statistical methodology and their use in the legal reasoning to better illuminate the more general relationship between “fact”-finding and. . .
Weekly Roundup: February 19, 2021
The conclusion of the UBI series, the continuation of the Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism Conference, and more!
Reconstructing the Algebra of Race and Rights
I follow Patricia Williams, Angela Harris & Aysha Pamukcu, in arguing universal rights, to basic income and other resources, are insufficient but necessary ingredients for justice. Indeed, I argue for permanent, non-discretionary funding of these rights. No one truly knows how much money the U.S. government spends encoding and encasing private property. . .
Leftist Benefits are In-Kind, Actually
The argument goes that cash benefits, such as UBI, afford recipients the dignity to choose what they need, versus in-kind benefits which paternalistically define that need for them. By removing government restrictions on spending, they allow recipients the freedom to consume on their terms. However, this so-called choice is in name only without a guarantee that. . .
Basic Income and the Freedom to Refuse
It would be ironic indeed if a UBI slipped quickly through the fingers of lower-income people of color and into the coffers of jurisdictions most aggressively criminalizing poverty. This would negate UBI’s ability to facilitate work refusal because UBI—devoured by debt—would no longer be available to meet basic needs without a wage (or connection to. . .
Universal Basic Income, Racial Justice, Climate Justice
UBI as part of the project of building collaborative security for all.
Weekly Roundup: February 12, 2021
UBI, Conference, Writing Contest, and more!
2 Announcements and 1 Tip
We interrupt the “Considering and Critiquing Universal Basic Income” symposium (which will continue next week!) to make two important announcements! And a tip on how to get updates from the Blog.
Basic Income, Care, and Wages for Housework
The question of whether basic income can resolve the problem of unpaid care work and the status of care work more generally requires addressing how a basic income is financed, because it is only as a redistributive program that basic income can have an emancipatory effect for those whose work is obscured by the structure of modern capitalist economies and. . .
UBI and Immigrants: Lessons from the Pandemic
Surely advocates of such programs do not envision Qatar as their model society. And yet it is too easy to imagine a version of a Gulf state arising from a basic income initiative that provides cash support to citizens, who no longer need to take work that is unsatisfying, while denying it to noncitizens, who are brought in do the difficult and dangerous jobs. . .
Considering and Critiquing Universal Basic Income: Introduction
This week we’re opening up a symposium on universal basic income (UBI). UBI is both an important topic in its own right and a useful lens for examining recurrent virtues and vices in projects of partial decommodification and universal provision. This post situates the discussion.
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